Foswiki Wiki

Anyone can add content... or change what is written... or change the organisation of the content

Whatever you write is... nicely presented... remembered... and never forgotten

Write using What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) text editing ... or you can use plain text with a simple topic markup language that is quick to learn and easy to remember ... or you can use full HTML for complex formatting tasks

Foswiki is also an "application platform" that lets you quickly build and use your own online applications ... and can be extended using an open plugins architecture ... with hundreds of user-contributed extensions already available off-the-shelf

Wiki Culture

Enough about mechanics; how is a wiki actually used ? Well, that's really up to you, but there are a number of tricks that the wiki community has developed for collaborative writing that work pretty well:

What can I edit?

Anything. But it's good etiquette to sign your contributions

If someone doesn't want you to edit a page, it's up to them to say so, clearly, on the page

But what if somebody doesn't like my edits?

In Foswiki, they can always recover the old revision and re-instantiate it if they really want to

Otherwise they should regard your changes as an opportunity for discussion

Pages in wiki are (usually) in one of three "modes"

DocumentMode

ThreadMode

StructuredMode

Foswiki doesn't automatically distinguish between these modes; they are purely semantic.

That's fine for the internet, but...

People often say that wiki culture isn't appropriate in a corporate setting. Ignore them! Sharing information helps any company work more efficiently. However, there may be genuine security concerns, so:

Viewing/editing topics can be restricted to any indvidual, or group of individuals

Contributed features

Basic Foswiki is rich with features, but is enriched even further by optional extension modules that may (or may not!) be installed in your Foswiki. These are usually classified as skins (modules that change the look-and-feel), plugins (modules that enhance functionality), wiki applications (sets of topics that implement an application) or contribs (modules that customise foswiki at a deep level).

When Foswiki is first installed, it comes with a default set of extensions pre-installed; you can see the list by visiting the InstalledPlugins page.

Getting more information

Foswiki has been worked on for over fifteen years, and there's
a lot of it. It can be daunting at first, so don't try to learn the whole
thing in one go. The best way to start is to use it, and when you need to do
something new, browse this web or look for examples online.